Think Great Thoughts
It’s amazing how quick you get at picking up on certain things when you become a parent. Some of your senses in particular get more of a workout than others. I regularly find my sense of smell having to work overtime and not in a good way! Following one of keziah’s daytime naps I often only need to reach the top of the stairs in order to know that we have a code brown situation that needs urgent attention. You cannot get rid of the dirty nappy odour without getting rid of the dirty nappy. Our sense of smell has a unique power to evoke emotion, and in our inner lives, our feelings are like aromas. Positive feelings thrill us whereas negative ones make us want to run away. If you’re anything like me then when they hit your mood dips, you lose energy, God seems distant, prayer seems pointless, sin looks tempting and life looks bleak.
Our feelings never descend on us at random. As a general rule, our emotions flow out of our thoughts. For example, I often feel worried about things and this is because I have a tendency to think anxious thoughts. These thoughts have become so automatic that, like the lingering dirty nappy odour, after a while I don’t even notice I’m thinking them. If we are not careful then we can very easily get used to something called “stinking thinking”.
Elijah the prophet suffered from this, which just goes to show that it can happen to anyone. He had reached a high point in his life when he defeated the prophets of Baal. Then the next event plunged him deep into fear. His high point had rattled the opposition and Queen Jezebel was now after his life. Not surprisingly a whole host of negative thoughts flooded his mind – thoughts of worthlessness, hopelessness, isolation and an inability to cope. He actually wanted to die and asked God to take his life.
God, being the great healer that he is though, soon got to work on Elijah in his situation. He had him take a nap and eat a snack before doing a little divine cognitive therapy to replace each of these life killing thoughts. He gave Elijah an epiphany, filled his future with hope because God would accompany him, revealed that he wasn’t isolated and infused his life full of meaning because God had a mission for him.
Elijah thought his problem was Jezebel, but there will always be a Jezebel in our lives. The real challenge for each and every one of us is actually between our ears!
The way we live will inevitably be a reflection of the way we think. True change always begins in our mind. The good news is that if God can change Elijah’s thinking, then he can change ours. What makes people the way they are – what makes you you – is mainly the way they think.
Romans 12:2 says “Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”
Becoming the best version of you, then, rests on one simple thing: Think great thoughts! People who live great lives are people who habitually think great thoughts. Their thoughts lean them towards confidence, love and joy. Trying to change your emotions by willpower alone without allowing the stream of your thoughts to be changed by the flow of the Holy Spirit is like trying to fumigate the house of the dirty nappy smell while leaving the dirty nappy around instead of putting it outside in the wheelie bin. God can change the way we think if we allow him to and there are a couple of steps we can use to help open ourselves up to his work. Step one is learning to monitor what happens in our minds and then step two is all about resetting our minds to a better frequency.
Step one – Learn to Monitor Your Mind
Our thought patterns become as habitual as brushing our teeth. After a while we don’t even think about them. As I said earlier, I get so used to thinking anxious thoughts that most of the time I don’t even notice what I’m thinking about.
One great barrier to a flourishing mind is sometimes called mindlessness. My Mum and I would be the first to tell you that my Dad is an expert at this. It’s as though he’s in the room with us but his mind isn’t. We can be filling him in on something and he’s making all the right noises as though he’s listening and taking in the information when actually he hasn’t the first clue about what we’re talking about. Fortunately for us we can now tell when he’s not fully with us and his mind is elsewhere because his facial expressions and tone of voice give him away. The other clue is when he asks us a question a bit later on which he wouldn’t be asking us if he’d actually taken in what we were talking about in the first place because he’d already know the answer! Clearly he doesn’t do this on purpose. It has just simply become a habit of my Dad’s mind
Paying attention to our thoughts is important, which is why one of the Psalmists prayed, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.” God knows our thoughts better than we do and he wants to help us learn what’s going on in our mind from one moment to the next.
The more I learn to monitor my mind, the more I encounter many unwelcome thoughts, most of which are all to do with my low self-esteem. This has been an issue ever since I dated a guy when I was seventeen years old. He would say he loved me just the way I was, but then he was always commenting on how he’d wish my hair was different, that I’d dress differently, that I’d act a certain way in particular situations and so the list goes on. At the time I was young, in love and didn’t know any better, so I just learned to live with it and tried my best to do things to please him. This relationship lasted sixteen months and it’s only been over the last few years that have I begun to realise the battering my self-esteem has taken as a result of it. At New Wine Women’s Conference in March 2009 God spoke very clearly to me during the worship time about this particular issue and from that moment has begun to bring me healing. He showed me that every time I put myself down, think of myself as useless and good for nothing I’m hurting both of us because I’m rubbishing His creation while damaging my self-esteem at the same time.
I’m beginning to recognise what kind of thoughts the Holy Spirit flows in. The apostle Paul gives us a great framework for understanding which thoughts and attitudes come from the Spirit. He writes: “The mind controlled by the sinful nature is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace”.
Whenever you have a weighty thought or one you can’t stop turning over and over in your head then it is worth asking some hard questions like What direction do those thoughts lead me in? Are they leading me toward life – toward God’s best version of me? Or in the other direction?
Ironically I had to ask myself a similar set of questions on Wednesday night of this week when I had begun to put this talk together because all I had running through my mind were negative thoughts saying that I couldn’t do this and that what I had to say was rubbish. Thankfully God’s Holy Spirit won through in the end and here I am.
One of the simplest and most powerful ways to monitor your mind is called the experience sampling method. Programme a watch or phone to beep at random intervals throughout the day. When it does, write down where you are and what you were doing. Then, on a scale of 1-5 (1 being not at all and 5 being very) monitor your thoughts on peace and how connected to God you are in that moment.
You might like to try this for a week and look for those activities and people that most help you live in the flow of the Spirit. How can you add those? What are the activities and relationships that most block the flow? How can you change or diminish those?
Learn to become aware of the flow of thoughts in your mind without trying too hard to change them. As Keziah moves from cruising around furniture to walking unaided she will consistently learn from her falls, but without judgements that paralyse her. For example, I’m sure she won’t be thinking “Fallen again! What a clumsy oaf I am! That is it, I’m crawling for the rest of the day. I don’t deserve to walk.” Learning to walk in the Spirit takes at least as much grace and strength as learning to walk on two legs, and the great thing is that the Spirit will always help lead us toward God’s best version of ourselves.
Step two – Learn to Set Your Mind
You can’t stop thinking wrong thoughts by trying harder to not think them, but you can do something else. You can “set your mind”, for the most basic power you have over your mind is that you can choose what you pay attention to. Right here, right now in this moment we can turn our thoughts in one direction or another.
Setting your mind is like setting a thermostat. It is creating a target for the climate. Once you set a thermostat, the heating will have to adjust in relation to the weather. It is a constant process, but the goal is for the system to create a life-giving climate. It is the same with our minds. I often fall into the trap of telling myself to stop thinking negative thoughts, which of course immediately brings them all to mind.
Colossians 3:2 says “Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things.”
Romans 8:5 says “Those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.”
Your thoughts have enormous power over your life. Researchers have found that tennis players can improve their backhands simply by rehearsing them mentally. Neurons that will change you are firing into your mind. Over time, those pathways between neurons were shaped in ways that are absolutely unique to you and God has no intention of wasting them.
Even twenty years ago, researchers thought the adult brain was genetically determined and structurally unchangeable. However, they have since found that even into adulthood the brain is amazingly changeable. Which synapses remain and which ones wither away depends on your mental habits. Those that carry no traffic go out of business and those that get heavily trafficked get stronger and thicker. The mind shapes the brain. Neurons that wire together fire together. In other words, when you practice hope, love or joy, your mind is actually, literally, rewiring your brain!
Being made in the image of God, you have the capacity for what might be called “directed mental force.” I wear contact lenses and occasionally I’ve accidentally dropped one on the carpet. In that moment my focus causes my brain to suppress attention to anything that could distract me, for example, lint, colour, design, fluff, etc… All kinds of sights simply don’t register on my radar. Neurons don’t fire. I have “set my mind” to look for that contact lens and it responds as if I was giving a dog the scent of a rabbit.
I’m sure I’m not the only one here who often thinks that they are the victim of whatever thoughts happen to be running through their heads. It is as if we are passive spectators watching thoughts run across a screen, with no control over what’s on it.
I find myself needing to be constantly reminded that there is a fundamental battle in the spiritual life being waged by the Evil One over the nature of the thoughts that run through my mind. The ultimate freedom that we all have, the freedom that no one can ever take away from us, is the freedom to decide what our mind dwells on. The challenge before us is to “set our mind” to look for the presence and goodness of God in our lives.
Sometimes emotions may be leading us down a destructive path, but the Holy Spirit always offers another way. In His flow your feelings will change. At any moment you can turn your mind to God. The Holy Spirit is flowing, wanting to renew your mind all the time. Therefore, I’d like to challenge all of us this week, myself included, to “set our mind”, regularly tuning into the Holy Spirit and asking Him to guide our thoughts. Then to pause, listen and see what He says to us in those moments.